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Google launched a new site called “News Lab” this week aimed at helping journalists with their reporting. The site will contain tools for newsrooms, including tutorials and best practices on how to use Google products in reporting, as well as provide access to the recently updated Google Trends service, and more. The intent is to better help reporters in an age where social media services have become the go-to for breaking news.

The make-up company Nars is planning to use Pinterest in a unique way to launch a new social media campaign. Nars has targeted three designers that have great success on Pinterest to create boards in an effort to launch the new Satin Lip Pencil Collection.

In collaboration with Nars the designers have developed boards on their own accounts that compliment the three pencil categories.

As a treat to the fans that follow the designers and their boards, for a week before the collection’s full release Nars fans will be able to purchase the lip pencils only by clicking on the images pinned to the Pinterest boards.

Nars has already successfully launched a social media campaign on Facebook focused on brand awareness.For this campaign, Nars used the analytic tool Pinfluencer to determine the three usere who have driven significant traffic to the Nars website. The main focus of this social media campaign was to generate sales from Pinterest.

Social media influencers can make a difference in your social media campaign.

Use analytics and be observant of who is helping with your social media efforts. Your business may find social media influences in people who retweet and re-post your content. Reaching out to your influencers and partnering with them on social media campaigns may help you reach a broader audience.

For more information on social media marketing and ways a social media marketing campaign can enhance your business contact JASE. Let JASE customize the perfect social media marketing plan for your business.

In today’s constantly changing world, social media can offer many great advantages to companies interested in communicating with their stakeholders. In the world of public relations social media communities and users can help push your companies message. Unfortunately, everything is not always pleasant on social media and can lead to small crisis communications situations for organizations.

A few examples of social mishaps are below:

A KitchenAid team member accidentally tweeted a political tweet from the brands Twitter page rather than their personal page.

Brands used trending hashtags regarding the devastating Hurricane Sandy to promote their brands.

Brands also used hashtags that were highjacked. For example, McDonald’s hashtag #McDstories was highjacked by customers that were unhappy with McDonald’s and its quality of food.

The best way to avoid social media mishaps is to create a social media plan. Often, without a plan social media is off the cuff and doesn’t often work. By creating a plan or strategy for your business the possibilities of incidents is limited. Creating a social media plan also helps you get results in your marketing efforts.

JASE tips to creating a successful social media plan.

Create goals– Know what you would like to see out of your social media plan as it relates to marketing, engagement and sales. Know what is possible and set realistic goals so the plan is not doomed from the beginning.

Action steps– Take specific actions that will help you complete each goal. These actions can include the creation of a social media schedule or a list of planned content for different social media communities. each action should be specific to the goal.

Measure results– Determine what tools will help you measure your efforts. There are numerous free analytic tools that can measure your social media activity. Facebook has always some form of insights on each business page. By analyzing what you have done you will learn what works for your business and what needs to change.

Social media planning does not have to be difficult. Often establishing goals is the easiest way to break the ice and helps you determine how you will accomplish each goal.

Social media is even easier with assistance from the pros at JASE Group. At JASE a specific social media strategy is created to increase your businesses marketing capabilities. With JASE social media marketing is more than a few tweets. Learn more about a tailor-made social media marketing plan for your business by contacting JASE today.

It is being reported that when the next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, IE10, is released it will have a do not track feature built in and already enabled. This would be a major development for digital marketers as we are dependent on the information we can gather from consumers’ web browsing tendencies.

The data that is collected allows us to better target potential consumers and convert them into sales. We have already seen a drop in keyword data from Google’s changes in their analytics toolset and this would only serve to increase the problem. IE10 would be the only web browser to have this feature enabled and not every IE user would be using IE10, so data would still be available for analysis.

The real problem would be if all the next generation of web browsers adopts the feature as well as IE10. The probability of this happening will continue to increase as privacy advocates and regulators continue to push for the mandatory privacy policy for all web browsing.

What do you think of the possibility of a “Do not track” policy? Leave us a comment below and let us know your thoughts. As always, please feel free to share this article with friends.

All businesses or organizations generate vast amounts data on a daily basis. But how many actually bother to gather, measure,asses and apply it to gain competitive advantage? Often critical choices are made without any guidance other than a hunch or feeling or feedback from a colleague. If a measurement tells you more than you knew before, it can be an important aspect of your decision process by reducing some of the uncertainty. Data Science Solutions is a Hampton Roads based statistical and quantitative consulting group specializes in methods to help your organization develop business metrics to improve performance, identify and fix problems and analyze options for reducing uncertainty about decisions.

At Data Science Solutions, our goal is to not only help you gather your data, but to turn it into information. Looking at data is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is another. We do so by helping you develop a set of business metrics that translates your data into information usable to drive your organization. Management guru Peter Drucker once noted “What gets measured gets managed.” This is certainly true, although in our view, business metrics can provide so much more including adding significant insight into your organizational clarity and of course improving your decision making.

Businesses succeed or fail based upon the decisions they make. Often times important decisions require a significant level of knowledge in order to achieve an optimal result. And just as often, businesses and organizations tend to make decisions when they are less informed then they could me. Without the proper input into a decision, resources can be misallocated or wasted, problems ignored, bad ideas accepted or even worse, good ideas rejected. However, decisions can be improved with the use of optimized measurements and metrics to better define the decision space and provide valuable inputs and guidance to the decision process.

The emerging fields of analytics and data science are helping organizations all over the globe become more competitive by collecting data, analyzing it and delivering the data as information that is actionable. Analytics can provide your business data-driven insight to help build competitive strategies and support smart decision making and effective execution. Your organization can start using these disciplines to improve performance, make better decisions, identify and fix problems and gain competitive advantage!

According to an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the number of college students that own tablets has more than tripled since last year. A survey by the Pearson Foundation asked 1,206 college students and 204 college-bound high school seniors about their tablet purchases. The survey revealed that students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years.

Another industry that will be changed by the use of tablets is construction. A recent article from TechCrunch explained that tablets are the first computers that are usable in the field. The article talked about how tablets will streamline much of how construction handles business in the field. A couple of the benefits construction companies will experience is that tablets will help cut down on paper used for blueprints and make communication easier between all the parties involved.

So what does this mean for your business?

Tablet usage is increasing in both personal and business applications, meaning that your business must be visible to the tablet world. A company must have their website and content geared toward all types of computers. The 2012 Local Search Usage Study found that almost half of all tablet users use tablets to purchase something from local businesses every week. Is your company website prepared for the increase in traffic?

To find success as technology changes and consumers adapt, invest in an inbound marketing plan. The investment will prove to be a pivotal move in your company’s success. Contact JASE to determine how an inbound marketing plan will help your company. Let JASE help out your friends too, share this article with someone you know.

Every ounce of data that a company can analyze creates a competitive advantage. The companies that are successful are usually ones who are able to effectively analyze data and remain flexible to ever changing market conditions.

Predictive analytics company Medio Systems is set to debut a new productive suite for businesses called inGenius Suite. inGenius Suite will be able to process massive amounts of data to identify possible revenue opportunities in customer usage patterns on connected devices.

The suite is based on a set of predictive algorithms that gather and analyze the real-time information, such as location, device type, and application usage, with customer propensities and interest. Medio states that its suite is targeting developers and publishers in gaming, retail, finance, mobile, and entertainment. Medio is also claiming that they have 105 million unique users and currently tracks 550 million daily events.

MARKETING TAKEAWAY

A business must know where its consumers are and what they are doing at all times to know how to effectively reach them. Having an analytics suite like inGenius would definitely be a beneficial tool. Better knowing how to strategize marketing efforts by consumer data would allow for better targeting of advertising campaigns, in turn, increasing sales.

What do you think of inGenius? Has your company demoed the product? Would it make a difference in your business? Leave us a comment below and let us know what you think. As always, please feel free to share this article with friends.

JASE Guest Blogger, Dean Knickerbocker, is the owner of Data Science Solutions, a Hampton Roads based statistical and quantitative consulting group. Dean’s goal is to help local businesses and organizations with the new emerging field of analytics and data science, and to provide a very personal, friendly and straightforward means of using mathematics to improve your business. He can be reached at dknick@datasciencesolutions.net or via www.datasciencesolutions.net.

Decisions are made everyday throughout your business or organization. These decisions may range from trivial to complex, and may be made instantly, or require a substantial amount of leadership time. But in either case, how often is your organization assessing whether the decisions were effective? Using techniques such as Data Science, Quantitative Methods, Analytics and Predictive Models can provide data-driven insight to help build competitive strategies, support smart decision making and effective execution. Data Science Solutions is a Hampton Roads based statistical and quantitative consulting group dedicated to helping you use these methods to help make important decisions and take effective actions.

One approach towards to making important decisions is to reduce or remove uncertainty or risk (risks are states of uncertainty where a possible conclusion constitutes a loss or other undesirable outcome). How often as a business leader do you make decisions based upon hunches or simply based upon your experience and expertise? Do you ever utilize measurement and quantitative insight to assist your process? Uncertainty can be measured and quantifiably assessed just like any other piece of information using a set of quantifiable probabilities with quantifiable outcomes, to help you make better informed decisions not based solely on hunches.

At Data Science Solutions, we develop quantitative models of possible results by utilizing a range of values for any factor that has inherent uncertainty. Our solutions, based upon Monte Carlo Simulations, identify the uncertainties associated with each decision factor and assign a precise set of probabilities or range of values. We also model the relationships amongst the decision factors to generate a means of calculating the results probability and producing a quantifiable outcome. But most importantly, our solutions are delivered in an easy to understand format, where you as the business leader can get the data and insight you need without being overcome by mathematical jargon.

Many important business scenarios, processes and decisions can be modeled as Monte Carlo Simulations. As part of a solution, uncertainty is modeled by sampling from the distribution of each possible outcome. A large sampling is conducted to achieve greater accuracy in modeling an outcome. Sensitivity analysis can be conducted to identify which inputs had the biggest effect on results and what the data combinations were when certain outcomes occurred. After a review of the results have been conducted, an appropriate and effective decision can be made.

Conducting Monte Carlo Simulations will help your business or organization achieve the following:

Better Measure and Quantitatively Asses Risk: Asses states of uncertainty using a set of quantifiable probabilities with quantifiable outcomes.

Predict Decision Impacts: Forecast the impact of decisions and analyze their impact.

Review Probabilistic Results: Results show not only what could happen, but how likely each outcome is.

View What Matters Most : Conduct sensitivity analyses to learn exactly which inputs had the biggest effect on results and what the data combinations were when certain outcomes occurred.

Making decisions are certainly the most important and often difficult task a business conducts. Your organization can make effective decisions, guided by measurement and quantitative insight. Utilizing techniques such as Analytics and Monte Carlo Simulations can help you make better decisions, compete and grow.